France

Architecture XTU
Area 3,600 sq m

As you navigate through a small entrance maze of plant beds, jazzy cartoon videos (by Les Films d'ici) with pedagogic messages play to you from screens mounted on trailers. But despite their fizz and colour, the wooden structure of France's pavilion behind them is even more alluring: a three-storey volume defined by vertical wooden fins, with curved corners and great arch-like incisions that reveal a wooden structural lattice and open into the interior-like cave-mouths.

Inside, there are more video trailers, but again they have competition. Every curved square of the gorgeously flowing ceiling is stuffed with the produce of France -- wine, cheeses, legumes, cooking pans and more. This is a foodie's magic grotto! 'We wanted to make a building that looks like a market,' explained Anouk Legendre, half the partnership of Paris-based eco-architecture practice XTU. The ceiling reflects 'the shape of hills and valleys' upside-down, she adds. Above the second floor restaurant and terrace, the roof is green.

The structural frame and most of what you see is made from 1,600 cu m French wood (spruce and larch) in thousands of pieces, including 750 curved sections. Even the orthogonal structural frame, notched to create the internal vaults, is wooden.

The pavilion pushes what can be made from 3D-modelled designs, computer-led carpentry and invisible joining. This puts France up with the likes of Norway at the cutting-edge of wooden-building technique. It also gives the Expo a truly organic building that is simply unchallenged for its curvaceous elegance.

Continue for Lithuania or read:

The making of Wolfgang Butruss' UK Pavilion

Milan Expo 2015: From Blueprint's point of view